Details
Mp3ready is a service for music lovers that allow them to discover, listen, download and share music with their friends. Mp3ready offers users the ability to listen to music found on the internet for free.
Mp3Ready, founded by Harry Gosling and Sam Wade, is a music search engine and recommendation platform that allows users to discover, listen, download, and share music with their friends. The idea for Mp3Ready came about when the founders realized that there were millions of mp3 files stored on the cloud, waiting to be discovered. They saw an opportunity to create a search engine that could retrieve these files and provide users with a seamless music listening experience without the need to store the music on any device.
Idea
There are tons of mp3 files stored on the cloud and you just need an engine that can retrieve them for us. This will allow us to play any piece of music without the need to store it on any device. Having also a recommendation engine as well will be a bonus!
Challenge
If you visit 4shared.com then you will find lot of mp3 files laying around. The same for many websites where people upload their music to the cloud. Is there a way we can play those songs? Is there a way where we can make a search engine from those songs?
Solution
We are building a search engine on deep web to find all the music buried in the web. The engine will be able to identify and crawl sites and get mp3 files.
We also need to make a specialized player which will be able to use the search engine results to play a specific songs. Then we will need a recommendation engine to allow people to like a piece of music then discover new pieces from it.
Story
We came up with the idea when we remarked that each of our friends has an account online where they store their songs. Those songs were accessible from a browser but known in most cases only to the owner. We were trying to look into our friend's directory to discover new music that we might like. Then the AHA moment came when we thought, why couldn't we turn this into an engine?
We contacted people in FasterCapital, explained our idea and prepared a business plan. They had already experience in developing a search engine and thus they can grealy help us as we don't have to start from zero.
We discussed on how we can improve on the crawler, increase its speed and make it dedicated to mp3 files. We crafted the specifications together and we started! After four months of working with them, we had a prototype. To our surprise, the prototype was able to find 100 million mp3 files within a month! After more improvement and running it for six months, we were able to cross our 2 billion songs!
The engine has also a recommendation style to allow users to discover music available online.
